How dark is the game supposed to be?

[zztraider]

I've recently followed the STEP guide v2.2.0 with ENB (using the STEP Light settings). I've followed the mod settings as listed, leaving Cathedral Weathers at its defaults. Everything appears to be working fine, except the game is surprisingly dark. Just from what I've seen in Riverwood, I'm uncertain how I'd be able to meaningfully see at all to play in a dungeon.

Here are a number of screenshots (which I've resized down to 1080p, but I can provide the original 1440p images if needed). The first screenshot in each pair is with ENB enabled, the second is with ENB disabled.

• The Riverwood Inn. Note how the door to actually get out of the room is basically invisble. It's still hard to see without the ENB, but not impossible.
  • ENB
  • No ENB
• Inside the Riverwood Trader. I can barely make out that there are shelves along the wall.
  • ENB
  • No ENB
• Outside on the road at night
  • ENB
  • No ENB
• Same spot but with a torch out. The torch seems to help a little, but not nearly as much as I was hoping when the ENB is enabled.
  • ENB
  • No ENB

 

Does this match with expectations? I also tried altering the Cathedral Weathers settings to Brighter interiors and nights, but the difference seemed very small.

As feedback for the guide, it might be helpful to provide reference images with some common expected settings (i.e., an No ENB install, ENB install at each tier) so it's easier to figure out if what I'm seeing matches expectations or if something went wrong in my installation. Otherwise, it's a fantastic guide and the instructions were easy to follow.

[zztraider]

Sorry for the double post -- I couldn't get it to let me upload additional images while editing, but thought some additional data points I ran across might be helpful. Here's another set of images, north of the Penitus Occulatus Output near Dragon Bridge. It's a bit cloudy, but still a rather sunny day, so the landscape and house seems awful dark for the weather when the ENB is enabled.

With ENB on:

With ENB turned off:

[z929669]

Are you using all mods and patches in 2.2.0 as instructed without any additional mods?

These screenshots are fairly typical of expectations. The vanilla lighting without ENB is far too bright in those shots, and with ENB is a tad bit too dark. Have you tried adjusting in-game brightness from options menu?

[zztraider]

Everything should be exactly as instructed unless I just screwed up somewhere. No intentional deviations, at any rate. I did turn the settings up to Ultra during the perf testing phase, since it was suggested for high enough framerates, but I did go back and should have verified/reapplied all of the changes in BethINI mentioned at the start of the guide.

I do generally agree with you about those screenshots -- it's too bright without ENB, but a bit too dark with it.

Here's some new screenshots with the Brightness setting turned all the way up (it was defaulted to right in the middle of the slider previously). I also adjusted Cathedral Weathers to the "Brighter" Interior Vision option.

• Riverwood Inn
  • ENB
  • No ENB
• Riverwood Trader
  • ENB
  • No ENB
• Riverwood outside
  • No Torch
    • ENB
    • No ENB
  • Torch
    • ENB
    • No ENB

 

While the differences between brightness settings seem very apparent when ENB is turned off, I can't really tell much difference when ENB is turned on. That's particularly surprising for these new interior shots, where there's both the brightness and the Cathedral Weathers setting changes that ought to be brightening things up. Does that suggest that something might be wrong with my ENB install? If not, are there ENB settings you would recommend tweaking to try to brighten things up a bit to something that feels more playable to me?

Edited March 10, 2023 by zztraider

[z929669]

1 hour ago, zztraider said:

Everything should be exactly as instructed unless I just screwed up somewhere. No intentional deviations, at any rate. I did turn the settings up to Ultra during the perf testing phase, since it was suggested for high enough framerates, but I did go back and should have verified/reapplied all of the changes in BethINI mentioned at the start of the guide.

I do generally agree with you about those screenshots -- it's too bright without ENB, but a bit too dark with it.

Here's some new screenshots with the Brightness setting turned all the way up (it was defaulted to right in the middle of the slider previously). I also adjusted Cathedral Weathers to the "Brighter" Interior Vision option.

• Riverwood Inn
  • ENB
  • No ENB
• Riverwood Trader
  • ENB
  • No ENB
• Riverwood outside
  • No Torch
    • ENB
    • No ENB
  • Torch
    • ENB
    • No ENB

 

While the differences between brightness settings seem very apparent when ENB is turned off, I can't really tell much difference when ENB is turned on. That's particularly surprising for these new interior shots, where there's both the brightness and the Cathedral Weathers setting changes that ought to be brightening things up. Does that suggest that something might be wrong with my ENB install? If not, are there ENB settings you would recommend tweaking to try to brighten things up a bit to something that feels more playable to me?

So if your BethINI settings are all per recommendations (including iMaxParticles, Ambient Occlusion, etc.), then you can try updating to the latest ENB binary.

I do think that ENB torch light should be brighter, so I will note that in the next PP Patch update.

These things can also be influenced by your driversoft graphics settings, so you might want to look at those just in case.

Otherwise, things like monitor and graphics hardware can vary a bit. To increase this lighting with ENB, there's many options, but I would play with increasing:

[ENVIRONMENT] - AmbientLightingIntensity*

and [SKYLIGHTING] values for exterior (I would not increase these much, as they are powerful and can affect many things)

Settings exist for interiors day/night and exteriors at several times. These also must be edited under ..\enbseries\Weather\ for EACH weather. Don't change anything in enbseries.ini.

 

[zztraider]

I've double checked my BethINI settings, and everything appears correct. I'm already using what appears to be the latest ENB binary, 0.488.

I've told GeForce Experience to not try to optimize my games, though based on the settings it's suggesting for Skyrim, I'm not sure it was ever actually modifying anything. Are there other settings you suggest checking there or in the NVIDIA Control Panel? I don't see anything super obvious that doesn't seem like it'll just globally affect every application I use.

For the AmbientLightingIntensity* settings, is it reasonable to go above 1.0, or will that cause other issues? It looks like AmbientLightingIntensityInteriorDay is already set to 1.0 in all the weathers, so using that to brighten up the interiors a bit will be difficult if it needs to be clamped 0 to 1.

Thank you for all your assistance, by the way. Playing around with some settings a bit, it does look like this will eventually get me to a good spot after some trial and error.

[z929669]

7 hours ago, zztraider said:

I've double checked my BethINI settings, and everything appears correct. I'm already using what appears to be the latest ENB binary, 0.488.

I've told GeForce Experience to not try to optimize my games, though based on the settings it's suggesting for Skyrim, I'm not sure it was ever actually modifying anything. Are there other settings you suggest checking there or in the NVIDIA Control Panel? I don't see anything super obvious that doesn't seem like it'll just globally affect every application I use.

For the AmbientLightingIntensity* settings, is it reasonable to go above 1.0, or will that cause other issues? It looks like AmbientLightingIntensityInteriorDay is already set to 1.0 in all the weathers, so using that to brighten up the interiors a bit will be difficult if it needs to be clamped 0 to 1.

Thank you for all your assistance, by the way. Playing around with some settings a bit, it does look like this will eventually get me to a good spot after some trial and error.

You can test in game using Shift+Enter to adjust settings on right side (current weather) to see the impact and limits of each setting.

I use AMD, so no idea about NVIDIA driversoft settings. You should be able to set by game though.

[druisiuil]

8 hours ago, zztraider said:

I'm already using what appears to be the latest ENB binary, 0.488.

Don't go by the version number. Boris does not use typical versioning - there have been 11 0.488s posted, 0.484 had 19 versions. I use this page to keep track of when he changes something: http://enbdev.com/news.html

[zztraider]

23 minutes ago, druisiuil said:

Don't go by the version number. Boris does not use typical versioning - there have been 11 0.488s posted, 0.484 had 19 versions. I use this page to keep track of when he changes something: http://enbdev.com/news.html

Well, that's confusing. But it does look like the files the guide tells me to take from that download have the same timestamps as the ones I already have, so it looks like I managed to catch the latest update anyway.

[zztraider]

Alright, I think I've got everything into a state I can work with. Going to record what I did in case it ends up being helpful to anyone stumbling on this thread later.

I played around with the settings mentioned for a good while. The SKYLIGHT settings didn't seem to noticeably affect things, so I ended up giving up on those. The AmbientLightingIntensity* settings did seem to help, but I had some trouble finding appropriate settings that made nights bright enough without taking those intensities above the daytime stuff. (Based on how those values are set up, I'm making an assumption that it's effectively lerping between those set points as the day progresses, so a Night value that's higher than Sunrise and Sunset would potentially cause some odd transitions.)

On a lark, I decided to try the other STEP ENB settings to see if that did anything useful for me. In particular, I knew by this point that I had the perf headroom to go up to Heavy without losing too much framerate.

Without any other changes, switching from Light to Heavy made nights far closer to being bearable, though I did not investigate the differences between them to try to understand why. With that change in place, I was able to get appropriate lighting by increasing the exterior AmbientLightIntensity* settings (except Night) by 0.2, AmbientLightIntensityNight by 0.35, and setting AmbientLightingIntensityInteriorDay/Night to 1.25 each. I also switched Cathedral Weathers to Brighter for both Interiors and Nocturnal.

At this point, I think my only real complaint is that torches don't seem to provide as much light as I'd expect, but it sounds like that's on the list for the next guide update, so I'll just look forward to that change.

Many thanks to both z929669 and druisiuil for their contributions here.

[z929669]

3 hours ago, zztraider said:

Alright, I think I've got everything into a state I can work with. Going to record what I did in case it ends up being helpful to anyone stumbling on this thread later.

I played around with the settings mentioned for a good while. The SKYLIGHT settings didn't seem to noticeably affect things, so I ended up giving up on those. The AmbientLightingIntensity* settings did seem to help, but I had some trouble finding appropriate settings that made nights bright enough without taking those intensities above the daytime stuff. (Based on how those values are set up, I'm making an assumption that it's effectively lerping between those set points as the day progresses, so a Night value that's higher than Sunrise and Sunset would potentially cause some odd transitions.)

On a lark, I decided to try the other STEP ENB settings to see if that did anything useful for me. In particular, I knew by this point that I had the perf headroom to go up to Heavy without losing too much framerate.

Without any other changes, switching from Light to Heavy made nights far closer to being bearable, though I did not investigate the differences between them to try to understand why. With that change in place, I was able to get appropriate lighting by increasing the exterior AmbientLightIntensity* settings (except Night) by 0.2, AmbientLightIntensityNight by 0.35, and setting AmbientLightingIntensityInteriorDay/Night to 1.25 each. I also switched Cathedral Weathers to Brighter for both Interiors and Nocturnal.

At this point, I think my only real complaint is that torches don't seem to provide as much light as I'd expect, but it sounds like that's on the list for the next guide update, so I'll just look forward to that change.

Many thanks to both z929669 and druisiuil for their contributions here.

So you added the 'by' values to the existing, or are those the final values after you changed them?

I will have a look at the diffs between the three ENB versions. They should look very ismilar in all aspects, but I'll verify.

New torch brightness values for ENB will be coming soon in the PP Patch update once I cross check the ENBs.

[zztraider]

18 minutes ago, z929669 said:

So you added the 'by' values to the existing, or are those the final values after you changed them?

The former.

The Sunrise through Sunset AmbientLightingIntensity* settings ranged from 0.9 to 1.0 originally, and now range from 1.1 to 1.2 locally. (There may be one or two exceptions, but from memory, most of them followed that pattern and ended up in the listed range.)

The AmbientLightingIntensityNight settings ranged from 0.6 to 0.7 initially, and now range from 0.95 to 1.05 depending on the weather.

That said, I think someone that understands more of these settings and how they fit together could probably come up with a better overall solution. Particularly since I made the ENB adjustments in addition to the Cathedral Weathers changes.

[aktillum]

Just coming to say that ENB was also way too dark for me initially.

One common issue is that native brightness / gamma sliders don't actually work in borderless fullscreen. Alot of people don't actually realize that.

Fullscreen apps take brightness/gamma privileges from the desktop, but most folks are playing in borderless fullscreen....well, you get the picture. They sit and twiddle the brightness/gamma sliders and wonder "why the hell isn't this working?"

So if you want in-game brightness sliders to have any impact, you need to be playing in exclusive fullscreen mode. And then, as others mentioned, you need to make tweaks to the ENB.

Quote

my only real complaint is that torches don't seem to provide as much light

That's also my complaint, but it's actually "realistic" tbf (groan, yeah I went there). But seriously, light a torch on fire in your backyard, it really only goes like <5 feet around you. Hell, even your cellphone flashlight only goes like 10 feet.

Edited March 14, 2023 by aktillum

[z929669]

4 hours ago, aktillum said:

Just coming to say that ENB was also way too dark for me initially.

One common issue is that native brightness / gamma sliders don't actually work in borderless fullscreen. Alot of people don't actually realize that.

Fullscreen apps take brightness/gamma privileges from the desktop, but most folks are playing in borderless fullscreen....well, you get the picture. They sit and twiddle the brightness/gamma sliders and wonder "why the hell isn't this working?"

So if you want in-game brightness sliders to have any impact, you need to be playing in exclusive fullscreen mode. And then, as others mentioned, you need to make tweaks to the ENB.

That's also my complaint, but it's actually "realistic" tbf (groan, yeah I went there). But seriously, light a torch on fire in your backyard, it really only goes like <5 feet around you. Hell, even your cellphone flashlight only goes like 10 feet.

Yeah, I never mess with those sliders, so I'm one of those that never noticed it's ineffectiveness in borderless fullscreen.

As far as torch realism, I do agree, but if you are ever in a room where there is NO light (like a cave) you will find that those torches or candles extend quite a distance as long as there's not a ton of dust in the air. You don't notice this when there is even a tiny bit of ambient light.

That said, I do agree that torch light could be brighter, so I have increased it again from ENB Light's value of 0.7 and Step's current value in the PP Patch of 0.85 to 1.0 when we update the Nexus. The default vanilla value (for non-ENB) is 1.75.

[z929669]

I should also mention on this topic that enabling Windows 11 (10?) HDR support via Display settings could impact in-game brightness with ENB and might also not be compatible with the game and your graphics hardware/software. On my system HDR works great for all applications and the OS and looks better, BUT it's not compatible with Skyrim graphics on my AMD system, so I have it disabled now after much toil troubleshooting glitcy SSE graphics.